Gunhawks

Gunhawks
Kid Cassidy and Reno Jones from Gunhawks #1, art by Syd Shores
Publication information
Publisher	Marvel Comics
Publication date(s)	1972-1973
No. of issues	7

The Gunhawks is the name of a pair of fictional comic book characters in the Western genre that first appeared in a self-titled series published by Marvel Comics.

The Gunhawks were Kid Cassidy and Reno Jones. As introduced in Gunhawks #1 (1972), Cassidy was the son of a plantation-owning family in the antebellum American South, and Jones was an African American slave of the family who was friends with Cassidy. They fought together for the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, with Jones fighting the Union because their soldiers had kidnapped his lover, Rachel Brown. After the war, they became wandering gunfighters, the Gunhawks, and continued searching for Rachel.

During the course of Gunhawks #6 (1973), Kid Cassidy was shot and killed, and Jones was blamed for the crime. (During the storyline in Avengers Forever, published from 1998 until 2000, the Avenger Hawkeye revealed that Cassidy had been killed prior to 1873).

With the next issue, the series was retitled to Reno Jones, Gunhawk, making Jones Marvel's second black character to have his own self-titled series, after Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. (The Black Panther had taken over the lead in the Jungle Action series a few months prior, but the Panther's name was not included in the series' title.) As it turned out, Reno Jones, Gunhawk #7 was also the final issue of the series, and the Gunhawks vanished into obscurity.

In John Ostrander and Leonardo Manco's 2000 miniseries Blaze of Glory: The Last Ride of the Western Heroes, the Gunhawks returned, but in a greatly modified form. It was "revealed" that the published adventures of the classic Marvel gunfighters, including the Gunhawks, had actually been dime novels based on the actual gunfighters' actions. In this revised version of events, Jones was actually a slave on Cassidy's family's plantation, the two men had only been friends as children, and Jones had actually shot Cassidy in self-defense. Reno Jones took up residence in the town of Wonderment, Montana, a town populated largely by freed slaves; there, he married a woman named Mary, and they had a son named Cass.